Teamwork is all about working together and watching out for each other’s backs. Effective teamwork is not even teamwork unless everyone works together and there are enough challenges to win over.

When you, as a business owner or manager have a team to maintain and manage their work efficiently then the team-building challenges that you would face are enough to get you frustrated and worn out.

Once you get past the first step of getting a team of professionals with the right balance of skills and devotion ready, you move on to the challenges of building that team.

Your next step would then be to zero in on the common challenges that you and your team need to address. After figuring out the key challenges that your team is facing, you would then need to find some of the practical ways of conquering each of them.

And so in today’s post, we will help you identify those major yet common challenges that most teams face and discuss some practical ideas for overcoming challenges to help you boost productivity and workflow among team members.

Related Article: Build And Manage An Efficient Remote Team With The Right Tool

Common team building challenges that teams encounter

Challenges are in every field of work, and so it is no different when you are trying to build a team or work with it. Here, we have highlighted some of the most common challenges that managers often come across.

• Minimal or no leadership capabilities
• Trust issues among team members
• Poor communication and understanding skills
• Office politics, clashes, and stress
• Dull working environment
• Confusion in understanding roles
• Lack of ability in long-shot thinking
• Zero diverse skill set and interest to learn
• Not being able to follow or deliver orders
• Lack of collaborative work tendency

In another study conducted by Robert Half Finance & Accounting regarding facing challenges in the workplace, the percentage goes something like this:

How to resolve the challenges in team building

It is not really possible for everyone to do everything. That is why you need team-building strategies to follow so that whatever challenges you may face become solvable for you.

Also, strategies are essential to keep your team all on the same page and ensure they are working at their full potential.

Check the 10 most proven ways to resolve challenges for building a better team –

So we have put together some of the solutions to common team-building challenges that you will be able to easily relate to and address to build a successful team.

01. Building trust to make things easier

To get a positive result out of teamwork, having trust in each other is really vital. In other words, it can be said that trust is the single most important ingredient for holding a team together. Without it, your team might not be able to deliver on your expectations.

In order to build trust between your team members, it is essential to allow your team to come up with their own solution to a problem. Try to avoid micromanaging as much as possible. Always remember that your leadership is the key to building trust and boosting the spirit of your team.

More so, here are some factors that influence the build of good trust.

• Defying crystal-clear expectations and limitations
• Frankness with one another
• A responsible attitude toward a given task
• Eagerness to solve critical issues
• Frequent communication and fruitful engagement
• Willingness to learn and listen
• Proving their trustworthiness to others

02. Developing effective communication

Lack of communication drills lowers your team’s morale, which eventually affects the bottom line of the company as well as the departmental targets. In order to simply improve communication practice, try to take your team out for lunch or dinner at some nearby restaurant, or take them to watch movies weekly or monthly.

Such outings will allow your team to converse more, getting closer to each other and breaking all the formal barriers between them. This will make them naturally open up and feel more comfortable with each other.

Moreover, this also provides the opportunity for you to show that you are there for one another and ready to help whenever they need with anything

03. Dealing with poor performance

If you don’t deal with the team’s poor performance early on, then there is every chance it will put a dent in the motivation of your whole team. You need to address the individuals who are performing poorly and are impacting the whole team’s spirit.

Have a difficult conversation with them if you need to, but make sure they feel motivated to give their best.

To make this whole process of dealing with poor performance easier, you may want to:

• Make him or her aware of the situation by talking it out. Ask questions to understand what their area of problem is.
• Discuss problems and ask relevant questions to find a solution together.
• Highlight and show examples of times when things were going really well.
• Avoid layering it with any emotion while giving any clear and specific feedback or instruction regarding their performance
• Monitor your progress once you have set definite goals and objectives.
• Be supportive, being clear about your expectations from them and the time frame that you are going to allow for performance improvement.
• Review progress together by holding regular weekly or monthly performance review meetings.

04. Encouraging collaboration, sharing, and learning

For any team to perform well, there is no obligation other than to work together. Moreover, to deliver top-notch and inventive solutions and results, collaborative task-doing is highly essential.

There are four key sectors where the characteristics of solid team collaboration can be summed. They are: Values Approach, Communication, Empathy (VACE)

• Values: Sharing the same values to be able to go the extra mile to deliver a good product or service.
• Approach: Collaboration isn’t something that can be done forcefully. You need to follow the right approach of encouragement, support, and feedback to motivate the team members to work together in order to get the best out of them.
• Communication: To share the same ideas and understand the roles of each other, people are required to create the right culture of collaborative tasks. Encouraging team members to share ideas in any possible way is part of an adequate communication strategy.
• Empathy: In any successful team collaboration, all team members listen and talk to each other in a similar way to share their ideas regularly. A good team collaboration always supports the idea of maintaining the right balance of support and motivation and listening to all ideas

So one can simply follow and apply these team collaboration, sharing, and learning ideas to effective team building.

05. Improving lack of engagement and purpose

For any business success, the engagement of a team is highly critical. Engaged team members are always passionate and interested in whatever they are doing. They always remain more committed to fulfilling the team’s goals and objectives.

So finding out what each of your team members enjoys doing is really important for improving the lack of engagement. Based on that, you can allot tasks to each of them so that they enjoy doing whatever you have assigned them to.

Now lack of purpose is directly related to a lack of engagement in a team. Working with a team and struggling or not enjoying being a part of it is usually due to the fact of the team having a lack of purpose. It’s difficult to bring the best out of any team from their work if they don’t even understand why they are doing it.

Especially when the work is with others then it becomes even more challenging. And this work without purpose attitude often leads to the below-par performance of the whole team. So set a definite purpose for your team and make sure everyone understands and feels it from their heart. Only then you will be able to build a team beyond just work.

06. Assigning responsibilities effectively

Being a leader doesn’t always mean you will have to have the attitude of ‘doing everything yourself’. It is essential to challenge this mindset and delegate the responsibilities efficiently. Learning the art of assigning responsibility will not only help develop your team but will also enable you to focus on the strategic issues.

Here are some ways you can make the delegating process effective while you build your team.

• First, you may consider passing on some of your own tasks that would essentially be helpful for them to develop.
• Try to assign the job that matches it based on the interests and development needs of the teammates.
• Always get the idea from the other person about how you should proceed once you have explained to him or her the key deliverables and outcome of the task.
• Review tasks and check in on progress regularly providing enough support and encouragement.
• Finally, accolades and appreciation motivate each team member for the individual task to make them feel special. Provide constructive feedback to make them feel valued for whatever work they have done.

07. Overcoming personality differences and clashes

Office politics and clashes are a part of every working domain. To add to that, there are personality differences in each team member. This can become a serious matter if you do not neutralize their differences and clashes.

So one shouldn’t take this issue lightly. This is why building an effective company culture really comes in handy. So instead of playing the blame game of who is at fault and what happened between them, you should focus mainly on looking forward to forgetting the past to build a satisfactory working relationship.

To help in overcoming the personality differences along with ego clashes, here are a few points to look into.

• Make it clear firsthand about the behavior that is not acceptable to the team members in the company. Also, let them know what kind of behavior is to be expected from them all the time.
• Make the people involved resolve their personal issues and find a way to make them work together effectively. This means you would be required to encourage individual responsibilities.
• Have a regular review of the behavior and change in the personality development progress of team members once you have sorted out the issues in the team. You do not want to deal with the same ego-clashing fights and office politics after having a good few weeks all over again.

08. Developing fore-sighting ability

Being able to see the big picture is an exceptional quality to have for any team member. You would always want someone in your team who has a great sense of presence, has the ability to have foresight, and can correctly predict every step that the team is about to take.

The businesses nowadays have gone beyond urgencies so being able to see the big picture beforehand and see whether everything fits together or not is highly imperative.

So for a team, this would mean they would have to think about seeing things beyond their own comfort zone. How things would turn out for the organization and how it would impact the customer experience

This is directly linked to the business’s long-term success and its sustainability.So make sure your team is getting the opportunity to think beyond their limits for the team and the company’s long-term success. As it would help them develop the fore-sighting ability and long-term thinking.

09. Getting rid of unnecessary team meetings

We all know how much valuable time we waste in a week or month on useless meetings. Unnecessary meetings are a complete waste of time and effort. So team leads or managers are required to cut down on those time-consuming team meetings every time so that the team members can concentrate on more productive things in the day.

So here are a few ways you can utilize your time better to avoid wasting too much time the next time you and your team sit together for a meeting.

• Plan in advance: Have a clear plan for each of the attendees with relevant topics to discuss with them. Plan ahead and provide a clear idea of what you want to achieve and what your company’s agendas are.
• Utilize time efficiently: Make sure you do not allow anyone to waste any valuable time with any irrelevant things inside meetings like reading the newspapers, talking and playing games on mobile, or having snacks. Make it a rule to concentrate fully on the meeting.
• Make it fast-track: Proper meeting planning and utilization of time will automatically enable you to focus only on important discussions and topics. This will even help you make your meeting short and precise instead of wasting the whole day in one meeting.
• Take feedback: Take a review of the meeting from the attendees and ask the participants about how it went and how it could be improved in the future.
• Note down action points: Mention and circulate the major action points along with the names of who will be responsible for what. It’s always better to ask someone in the meeting to note down the key highlights and points of discussion in the meeting and hand them to the attendees after the meeting is over.

10. Reducing dependency on the team leader

Overdependency on the team leader can be detrimental to team building, just like one person dominating the whole team. Typically, all of the team members are working under one qualified or experienced team leader when a single person dominates the team. 

However, too much dependency on team leaders is also harmful to effective team building. Therefore, reducing dependency is essential to building a solid team.

Along with backing up the team and its members, a leader should also empower the whole team. Once the team is settled, a team leader should only be there to confirm any tough or essential decisions being made for any project. He should also define the team’s ultimate goal and what his role is within the team.

At the same time, he would also have to let the team face the music in tough situations and encourage them to come up with solutions to tough challenges on their own without his involvement all the time. Only then can a team be said to be built on its own without relying too much on the team leader. 

Team-building success requires the best tools to overcome challenges

So far, we have discussed the challenges we usually face while building a team and how we can overcome them.

But there is one crucial thing that we didn’t mention: using an automated tool to boost efficiency. Well, even successful team building requires help from a reliable team or project management tool like WP Project Manager to hold your team together in one place.

More essentially, the tool helps the whole team manage their tasks in a more organized way than ever. This is definitely something that would help in overcoming a number of challenges like team collaboration, communication, and engagement as discussed in the points above. So you might as well want to check out:

Moreover, if your team building concerns more with the HR department, then there is WP ERP HRM to keep your team or employee on the same page. This complete HR management module of WP ERP covers almost every area of your employee management, starting from leave management to employee profiles to attendance to advanced reporting and more.